FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

FreeBSD -- EAP-pwd side-channel attack

Affected packages
12.0 <= FreeBSD < 12.0_3
11.2 <= FreeBSD < 11.2_9
wpa_supplicant < 2.8
hostapd < 2.8

Details

VuXML ID 60129efe-656d-11e9-8e67-206a8a720317
Discovery 2019-04-10
Entry 2019-04-23

Problem Description:

Potential side channel attacks in the SAE implementations used by both hostapd and wpa_supplicant (see CVE-2019-9494 and VU#871675). EAP-pwd uses a similar design for deriving PWE from the password and while a specific attack against EAP-pwd is not yet known to be tested, there is no reason to believe that the EAP-pwd implementation would be immune against the type of cache attack that was identified for the SAE implementation. Since the EAP-pwd implementation in hostapd (EAP server) and wpa_supplicant (EAP peer) does not support MODP groups, the timing attack described against SAE is not applicable for the EAP-pwd implementation.

See https://w1.fi/security/2019-2/eap-pwd-side-channel-attack.txt for a detailed description of the bug.

Impact:

All wpa_supplicant and hostapd versions with EAP-pwd support (CONFIG_EAP_PWD=y in the build configuration and EAP-pwd being enabled in the runtime configuration).

References

CVE Name CVE-2019-9495